a curator's office in a micro gallery setting
now at the micro gallery
Airfield: Works by Charles Cohan
Curator's Office is pleased to present a body of work entitled Airfield by American artist Charles Cohan. The artist has exhibited his work internationally yet seems to draw upon the common thread that unites all global travelers. Airfield includes prints of airport terminals and runways from all over the world, mysteriously interpreted into a symbolic language that engages both abstraction and representation.
A gallery reception for the exhibition will be held on Saturday, March 15, from 6 - 8pm.
The images become a cryptic shorthand for a human experience that speaks of both freedom and fear. Cohan notes, "Intended to form a graphic typology, the project visually references a range of image archetypes including utilitarian architectural forms, informational symbols, linguistic characters, directional signs, and symbolic illustrations. Printed in black with a stark outline configuration, the designs reflect the demographics of security, surveillance, and distribution within the architectural vocabulary of the plan diagram."
View Terminal Series
View Runway Diagrams Series
View installation images
Charles Cohan has focused his life on the medium of printmaking, and the works in Curator's Office include labor-intensive coborundum collagraph prints and lithographs. In a monograph about Cohan, art historian Jaimey Hamilton writes, "In these most recent series, Cohan has further meditated on how our relationship with nature has generated a proliferation of ‘non-places.’ Airports, fast-food chains, and internationally branded wholesale stores are such ‘non-places,’ reproducible structures not specific to any locale, which distort our sense of scale and understanding of how we impact a global environment. Living on Oahu, about 3,000 miles from the nearest large landmass, has made this condition readily apparent to Cohan. As a result, he has started a number of series about our travel trajectories, and the airports that serve as points of origin and departure. His diagrams show them as emblems of mass-produced architecture and monotonous asphalt constructions. Even though each has its own unique floor plan, they are anonymous enough so that you never get a sense of where exactly you have landed. And unless you study the back of in-flight magazines, the structures do not have obvious unique identities."
The prints are presented as a wall installation of 22" x 22" prints of airport terminals facing a wall installation of 22" x 19" prints of runways. Hamilton continues, "The Terminals become completely de-spatialized abstractions, and their gridded presentation, with no labels nearby to reference the airport's location, also emphasizes their placelessness. A real sense of the passage of space and time between these airports is replaced by a regularized and deterritorialized grid. The result is a representation of our confused and dispersed postmodern geography. Runways, is similarly disorienting. Global trajectories are articulated more literally in that each image shows the possible flight paths of our contemporary world, but there is no way to know whether you will be heading east, west, north, or south. When the two series are displayed facing each other, the spaces are even further abstracted. There is no direct correlation between airport and runway. In this installation, the steady repetition and the confusion of scale calls attention to the way that (post) modernity has regulated and enforced the multiple not only in terms of print reproduction, but also in term of the mass manufacture of vernacular architecture."
Read The Washington Post review
Read The Washington City Paper review
Charles Cohan will be having a simultaneous exhibition entitled Tectonic at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, MD from February 19 April 20. He will also have works on view March 1 and 2 in Pyramid's booth at the Baltimore Museum of Art's Contemporary Print Fair. www.pyramidatlanticartcenter.org
Cohan received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking from California College of Arts and Crafts and a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, NY; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the New York City Public Library, New York, NY; the Minnesota Museum of American Art, St Paul, MN; the Pilchuck Glass School, Seattle, WA; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI; the Kennedy Museum of American Art, Athens, OH; the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; the University of North Dakota Art Museum, Vermilion, ND; the University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, IA; Fresno Arts Center, Fresno, CA; Florida State University Art Museum, Tallahassee, FL; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS; City of Palo Alto Cultural Center, Palo Alto, CA; California State University, Long Beach, CA; Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA; and the State Art Museum of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, Russia